HEATED PLANET

Planet in Peril

Earth Is ‘Alive! Awake! (and Possibly Really Angry!)’ in Climate Change-Focused Exhibit • BY BRENDAN L. SMITH

The Secret Life of Earth: Alive! Awake! (and Possibly Really Angry!) THROUGH SEPT. 6, 2020 AMERICAN VISIONARY ART MUSEUM 800 KEY HIGHWAY, BALTIMORE, MD. (410) 244-1900 | WWW.AVAM.ORG

limate change is usually viewed as a scienti c issue or a political debate, at least in the United States where President Trump and his minions deny climate change is real despite the overwhelming evidence.

Climate change is just one of the myriad threats to our planet that artists are addressing — or confronting — in their work, and it couldn’t be more timely as Australia burns, icebergs melt and islands sink under rising seas. With the 50th anniversary of Earth Day taking place this April, the American Visionary Art Museum’s latest exhibition brings together a diverse group of artists whose work celebrates nature and sounds a clarion call about our persistent apathy and obstinance in the face of worldwide environmental calamity.

“ e Secret Life of Earth: Alive! Awake! (and Possibly Really Angry!),” which marks the Baltimore museum’s 25th anniversary year, features nearly 90 pieces of art by self-taught painters, photographers, fabric artists and sculptors. Alongside the art, the exhibition aims to give viewers an entertaining but educational “crash course” on the intricacies of earth’s ecosystems and the rapidly changing state of its climate with a plethora of facts, trivia and science, including hopeful stories of innovative solutions to balance out the warnings of pending environmental doom.  e exhibition has good intentions but an uneven scattershot execution with half of the small amount of gallery space wasted on a site-speci c installation that spouts platitudes about positivity. However, the exhibition opens with a  ourish with a formal white silk gown ornately embroidered with two birds, but these aren’t peaceful doves or brightly hued lovebirds. One hawk is ready to sink its talons into a  eeing hare while another has killed a smaller bird on a branch with a talon sunk into its bloody broken neck. “Birds of Prey” by Chris Roberts-Antieau stirs con icting emotions, revealing both the beauty and cruelty in the kill-or-be-killed natural world.

Around the corner, a sextet of vividly green but remarkably lifelike apes and monkeys hang from trees or sit on their haunches in a vibrant green jungle fashioned from dried plants, rhinestones and other colorful found objects. Johanna Burke’s “Another Green World” celebrates the majesty of our closest cousins and their familial bonds to each other.  e installation was commissioned by the Bergdorf Goodman luxury department store in New York City, where Burke works as a fabricator, for a 2016 holiday window display. She said the work was inspired by “1960s psychedelic art, the paintings of Louis Wain, Indian block prints and all manner of decorative patterns.”

Another installation titled “What’s Cooking” by Baltimore artist Bobby Adams most directly confronts climate change in a humorous and powerful telling. A glowing red globe is stu ed inside a 1970s vintage yellow oven beneath the words “EARTH IN DANGER WHEN RED BLINKING.” A toy penguin, gira e and monkey are being cooked in pots on the range next to a melting Salvador Dalí-esque clock.  is exhibition is  lled with wall text about the numbing statistics of climate change, but Adams’s work brings those abstract numbers to life. Sometimes humor can provide a pathway around apathy toward some desire for action.

Unfortunately, the largest gallery in the exhibition is wasted on a site-speci c installation titled “RELEASE” by artist and Rāja yoga practitioner Santiago Navila. Taut strips of fabric stretch in panels across the gallery with a video projected through one of the panels in the center of the room.  e video begins with a news segment about the great garbage patch of  oating plastic in the Paci c Ocean but then veers into stock footage of dolphins, wildebeest and random disjointed nature scenes. A voiceover murmurs, “How can I free my mind? How can I create a positive world? Let go.  e past is the past…” and so on. Even though it’s a site-speci c installation tailored to this exhibition, it feels like an o -the-rack New Age-ish reduction of mindfulness to some trite phrases that aren’t really connected to nature or anything else.

Back in the  rst gallery of the exhibition, teen activist Greta  unberg talks about the dangers of climate change in a video of an interview on “ e Daily Show.”  unberg has a refreshingly direct and confrontational approach of calling out world leaders (especially Trump and his ilk) for their refusal to tackle climate change. Her demands for action raise a generational divide where youth are rightfully angry about the refusal of their elders to take any meaningful actions about climate change, which will burden future generations long a er the baby boomers are dead and gone.

Toward that end, there’s also a disconnect between the exhibition’s environmental focus and some of the American Visionary Art Museum’s own practices. I counted three paper towel dispensers (and no hand dryer) in one men’s bathroom. A museum shouldn’t bemoan the destruction of the Earth’s habitat in an exhibition and then contribute to it in its own bathrooms.

While there is strong work on display, the exhibition’s title aptly reveals its lack of focus or clear intent.  e Earth has always been alive(!) and awake(!), and what secret life is being revealed?  e Earth is literally on  re and there’s nothing secret about it. Brendan L. Smith (www.brendanlsmith.com) is a contributing writer for  e Washington Diplomat and a mixed-media artist and curator (www.brendanlsmithart.com). C

W D In “The Secret Life of Earth,” artists celebrate nature while warning about the effects of climate change, as seen in pieces such as Bobby Adams’s “What’s Cooking,” pictured on the culture cover, as well as Chris Roberts-Antieau’s “Birds of Prey,” above, and Johanna Burke’s “Another Green World,” at left. PHOTO: DAN MEYERS / COURTESY OF THE ARTIST PHOTO: DAN MEYERS / COURTESY OF BERGDORF GOODMAN AND THE ARTIST